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1 min read
Pola & Bryson - Want It ft. IYAMAH (Mefjus Remix)
Read more . . . →Hand a soulful, rolling Pola & Bryson tune to Mefjus and you already know the floor is about to fall out from under it. The original Want It rode on IYAMAH’s gorgeous vocal; Mefjus keeps that warmth and then bolts a far meaner, more technical engine underneath. His drum programming has always been borderline show-off precise, and here it serves the song instead of swallowing it — the snares snap, the bass moves in ways that feel almost three-dimensional on a decent system. That tension between the tender vocal and the brutal low end is the entire appeal, and the...
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1 min read
Viperactive - MERCY x POP IT
Read more . . . →This is gleefully stupid in the best possible way. Viperactive takes two ideas that have no business in the same track, a “MERCY” chant and a “POP IT” bounce, and smashes them together into something built purely to make a crowd lose it. Trap Nation uploads can run together into one long beige drone of festival trap, so I notice when one of them actually has a personality, and this has personality to spare. The drop is obnoxious in the way good trap should be, with that detuned brass-honk lead that sounds like a malfunctioning car horn doing the heavy...
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1 min read
Projects in Blue - Technicolour
Read more . . . →What is it about a good chord progression that can carry an entire track? Technicolour is basically a clinic in that idea — Projects in Blue find a warm, slightly nostalgic melodic core and just let it bloom. It lands in that lush, melodic-electronic zone where the line between dance music and something more cinematic gets pleasantly blurry. The percussion stays light on purpose so the harmony can do the heavy lifting, and the whole thing has a glow to it that genuinely earns the title rather than just borrowing it. This is a producer I didn’t have much of...
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1 min read
Raphi - Giving U
Read more . . . →Raphi keeps it lean and effective on Giving U, and there’s something refreshing about a dance track that just gets on with it. No twelve-layer build, no manufactured drama — a clean hook, a groove that moves, and a vocal that does its job and gets politely out of the way. Spinnin releases live and die on this kind of immediacy, the song that works on first listen at a festival without needing a backstory or a lore video. The production is crisp and bright, mixed for big speakers and afternoon sun. It’s not reinventing anything and it isn’t pretending...
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1 min read
Body Ocean & Matsu - Fall To The Ceiling
Read more . . . →Fall To The Ceiling earns its upside-down title with a drop that genuinely disorients you the first time, flipping the rhythmic emphasis so you lose track of where the downbeat is for a couple of bars. Body Ocean & Matsu clearly enjoy messing with your sense of gravity here. Where their other Dirtybird cut rides a straightforward bounce, this one is weirder and more interesting, full of off-kilter percussion and a bassline that seems to fall away just when you expect it to land. That tension between expectation and what actually happens is the entire appeal. It’s tech house for...
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1 min read
Defqon.1 is this week and the labels just emptied the armory
Read more . . . →Gates open at Biddinghuizen this week and the release schedule clearly knows it. Every label with a stake in the weekend dumped its heaviest stuff in the last few days, so right now your feed is about 90% kick drums and a guy screaming about a sacred oath. Here’s what actually clawed its way out of that pile: five fresh drops that’ll go off in the field before the anthem even hits. 1. Adaro & Unresolved - Original Gangsters (Raw and Mean) Two rawstyle lifers who somehow never made a track together until last week. It’s exactly what “no hypes,...
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2 min read
They Voided 30,000 People's Stock, Then Handed The New CFO $26 Million Of It
Read more . . . →This spring Oracle fired up to 30,000 people, most of them by early-morning email, and booked something like $2.1 billion in restructuring costs to do it. The number that matters isn’t the headcount, though — it’s the fine print on how they were cut loose. Under Oracle’s severance terms, anyone laid off lost their unvested restricted stock the instant they were terminated. Whatever stock had already vested, you kept, sitting in your Fidelity account. Everything you’d been promised and hadn’t yet crossed the finish line on simply evaporated the moment HR hit send. Workers on Blind and TheLayoff started comparing...
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1 min read
saka - styx!
Read more . . . →Two and a half minutes of saka deciding that subtlety is for other people. styx! opens on this almost-pretty melodic feint and then guts it with a bassline that sounds like a server room catching fire. What I like is how little fat there is on it — no eight-bar runway, no polite intro, just straight into the mess. UKF have been leaning harder into this newer, weirder strain of dubstep lately and saka is one of the names making that bet pay off. There’s a confidence in leaving that much empty space around the low end, trusting the sound...
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1 min read
Spinnin' Sessions Radio - Episode #685
Read more . . . →An hour-long label radio mix is a different proposition from a single track, and Spinnin Sessions has settled into being a reliable temperature check on where commercial dance is pointing right now. Episode 685 rolls through the current crop of big-room, festival-leaning records with the kind of momentum that makes it good fuel for a workout or a long drive where you’re not paying close attention. You won’t agree with every selection — that’s the nature of a label showcasing its own roster — but the tracklist doubles as a useful map of what’s about to be everywhere this summer....
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1 min read
Subsonic & Lauren L'aimant - Out Of My Head
Read more . . . →There’s a specific feeling when a liquid-leaning DnB track gets the vocal exactly right, and Out Of My Head sits right in that pocket. Lauren L’aimant’s top line is wistful without being weepy, and Subsonic gives it room to breathe before the drums come in and lift the whole thing off the floor. The contrast is the trick: the melody wants you to feel something, the rhythm wants you to move, and the track flatly refuses to choose between them. I keep coming back to the breakdown, where it strips down to almost nothing and then rebuilds with this satisfying...
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